00:00Hey, everyone. I want to talk about something important today because it's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram.
00:08I started building social media to give people a voice.
00:11I gave a speech at Georgetown five years ago about the importance of protecting free expression, and I still believe this today.
00:18But a lot has happened over the last several years.
00:21There's been widespread debate about potential harms from online content.
00:25Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more.
00:29A lot of this is clearly political, but there's also a lot of legitimately bad stuff out there.
00:34Drugs, terrorism, child exploitation.
00:37These are things that we take very seriously, and I want to make sure that we handle responsibly.
00:41So we built a lot of complex systems to moderate content.
00:45But the problem with complex systems is they make mistakes.
00:48Even if they accidentally censor just 1% of posts, that's millions of people.
00:53And we've reached a point where it's just too many mistakes and too much censorship.
00:58The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.
01:04So we're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.
01:13More specifically, here's what we're going to do.
01:16First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the U.S.
01:23After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.
01:31We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth.
01:36But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S.
01:43So over the next couple of months, we're going to phase in a more comprehensive community note system.
01:50Second, we're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.
02:00What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas.
02:08And it's gone too far.
02:10So I want to make sure that people can share their beliefs and experiences on our platforms.
02:15Third, we're changing how we enforce our policies to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.
02:24We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation.
02:28Now we're going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high severity violations.
02:33And for lower severity violations, we're going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action.
02:39The problem is that the filters make mistakes and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn't.
02:44So by dialing them back, we're going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.
02:50We're also going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content.
02:57The reality is that this is a trade-off.
02:59It means we're going to catch less bad stuff, but we'll also reduce the number of innocent people's posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.
03:08Fourth, we're bringing back civic content.
03:11For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed.
03:15So we stopped recommending these posts.
03:18But it feels like we're in a new era now, and we're starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again.
03:24So we're going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.
03:32Fifth, we're going to move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our U.S.-based content review is going to be based in Texas.
03:41As we work to promote free expression, I think that it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.
03:51Finally, we're going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more.
04:00The U.S. has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world.
04:05Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship and making it difficult to build anything innovative there.
04:12Latin American countries have secret courts that can order companies to quietly take things down.
04:18China has censored our apps from even working in the country.
04:22The only way that we can push back on this global trend is with the support of the U.S. government.
04:29And that's why it's been so difficult over the past four years when even the U.S. government has pushed for censorship.
04:35By going after us and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further.
04:41But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.
04:47It'll take time to get this right, and these are complex systems. They're never going to be perfect.
04:52There's also a lot of illegal stuff that we still need to work very hard to remove.
04:57But the bottom line is that after years of having our content moderation work focus primarily on removing content,
05:04it is time to focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our systems, and getting back to our roots about giving people a voice.
05:12I'm looking forward to this next chapter. Stay good out there, and more to come soon.
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